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Fairness Begins with State: Purifying Latent Preferences for Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning in Interactive Recommendation

arXiv:2603.03820v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Interactive recommender systems (IRS) are increasingly optimized with Reinforcement Learning (RL) to capture the sequential nature of user-system dynamics. However, existing fairness-aware methods often suffer from a fundamental oversight: they assume the observed user state is a faithful representation of true preferences. In reality, implicit feedback is contaminated by popularity-driven noise and exposure bias, creating a distorted state that misleads the RL agent. We argue that the persistent conflict between accuracy and fairness is not merely a reward-shaping issue, but a state estimation failure. In this work, we propose \textbf{DSRM-HRL}, a framework that reformulates fairness-aware recommendation as a latent state purification problem followed by decoupled hierarchical decision-making. We introduce a Denoising State Representation Module (DSRM) based on diffusion models to recover the low-entropy latent preference manifold from high-entropy, noisy interaction histories. Built upon this purified state, a Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning (HRL) agent is employed to decouple conflicting objectives: a high-level policy regulates long-term fairness trajectories, while a low-level policy optimizes short-term engagement under these dynamic constraints. Extensive experiments on high-fidelity simulators (KuaiRec, KuaiRand) demonstrate that DSRM-HRL effectively breaks the "rich-get-richer" feedback loop, achieving a superior Pareto frontier between recommendation utility and exposure equity.
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Curriculum Learning for Efficient Chain-of-Thought Distillation via Structure-Aware Masking and GRPO

arXiv:2602.17686v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Distilling Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning from large language models into compact student models presents a fundamental challenge: teacher rationales are often too verbose for smaller models to faithfully reproduce. Existing approaches either compress reasoning into single-step, losing the interpretability that makes CoT valuable. We present a three-stage curriculum learning framework that addresses this capacity mismatch through progressive skill acquisition. First, we establish structural understanding via masked shuffled reconstruction. Second, we apply Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) on masked completion tasks, enabling the model to discover its own balance between accuracy and brevity. Third, we identify persistent failure cases and guide the student to internalize teacher knowledge through targeted rewriting, again optimized with GRPO. Experiments on GSM8K demonstrate that our approach enables Qwen2.5-3B-Base to achieve an 11.29 percent accuracy improvement while reducing output length by 27.4 percent, surpassing both instruction-tuned variants and prior distillation methods.
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